Waiting/November
Tomorrow I will know the fate of "Peak of the Ocean." Tomorrow, tomorrow. Today, no. There is no use checking and re-checking my email, no point in loading and reloading the newsgroup, because today I will not know. No. But this knowledge does not stop me.
Despite the (I hope) goodness of this story, I realize my chances of acceptance for this anthology are very slim. And yet ... yet. It's always the "yet", isn't it? The howevers and maybes and perhapses that keep us going.
So I am waiting, and attempting to fill my time constructively. Yesterday I started what seems to be a real draft of "Doors"--no, wait, call it by its real (and more confusing) title, "Ohntai"--and should continue on that. I finished
The Castle of Llyr and continued
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, and eyed
Anna Karenina with a weary kind of interest. (It's not that I dislike the book, realize, just that I've been unable to concentrate on it for more than a few hours a week, and it's too heavy to bring with me regularly on the bus or the subway, and so it sits there, an 800-page presence at the back of my mind and a weight on my box of a bedside table.) I have filled my neti pot with water and salt and am waiting for it to cool; I realized that I haven't been able to breathe well for some time and would like to remedy that. I ponder making a banana drink, and ponder eating some snacks, and wonder what I did to my back to make my spine feel so bruised.
As lovely as it is to be guaranteed of such a quick turnaround time, it is somehow agonizing, too, as I have no time to forget about it. I've had a story at On Spec for something like eight or nine months, and remember it now only as one remembers their last birthday, an excitement that has become blurred around the edges.
And as I wait, and as I type, I am aware of this strange heaviness that has settled on me again. I fight it--I have been playing a mixture of Counting Crows and Belle & Sebastian ("Miami," "Sleep the Clock Around," "New Frontier," "Stars of Track and Field," start again)--but in the quiet it is so easy to just sit and drift within this grip. I am aware of the strange distance of my own words. It's something to do with darkness, and cold, and being alone. I think it's called November.
